"Y" means "Young" in Samsung's Galaxy vernacular, and that's where this budget Android is very much aimed.

The budget Android space is rapidly getting more crowded, with the likes of the HTC Wildfire S, the Orange San Francisco 2, T-Mobile's Energy and Vivacity, and even the new Huawei Ascend G300 all fighting for your pennies, so any new handset needs to be a bit special.

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Design

As budget Androids go this is more basic than most, and is clearly intended as an inexpensive first handset to introduce teenagers to the world of smartphones. For a start, it's very small, easily cupped in smaller hands and won't take up much room in the schoolbag.

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It's got the classic Galaxy look though, with slick-looking shiny black plastic front, and while the back feels cheap and thin, it does on the high-end Galaxy S2 as well -- it's a Samsung thing. This being a youth phone, there are alternative colours available -- white and pink, with different coloured backs you can swap around to suit your mood or personality.

The screen is where the Galaxy Y's low price is most obvious. It's small, at three-inches, but more importantly it's relatively low-resolution at 320x240 pixels (133 pixels per inch) and even manages to look a little fuzzy and ill-defined, especially with text. Web pages tend to look a little cramped (or at least they do if you're used to a more standard-sized screen) and it really helps if you have small fingers to negotiate the on-screen keyboard -- even using Swype mode -- where you don't have to remove your finger from the screen.

Although it's capacitive, it's not very sensitive either, and we often found ourselves having to make several taps before it would react.

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Software

It's running Android 2.3.6 Gingerbread, which is what you'd expect from a budget device (only more expensive handsets are debuting with the latest 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich at the moment). Samsung has done its bit to personalise the interface with its TouchWiz user interface, which offers up to seven pages you can fill with widgets and icons.

The 832MHz processor proved to be quite nippy in practise, and can run several applications at once without breaking a sweat. However, it will struggle a bit with hi-res games. It has 3G network capability and Wi-Fi too, so you can get fast internet access pretty much wherever you are.

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5 items

The two-megapixel camera is about as basic as it gets, though this being Samsung it's not bad quality for the spec.

Yes, colours can be a bit washed out, and you'll need to be careful with your light, but for quick snaps to throw up on Facebook it more than does the job. There's no flash but extras include autofocus, smile detection and panorama mode. (You can see sample photos in the gallery images of this review.) Moving images aren't so good though, and it records stuttery, low-quality 160x120-pixel video at a low frame rate of 15fps. In a nutshell, it's not great for recording video.

There's only 160MB of memory on board and our test sample from Three came with a 2GB microSD card, though it can handle up to 32GB.

The battery was pretty poor, even for a low-powered handset like this, and it barely delivered a day's worth of steady use. It has a freaky little whistle (almost like a human whistle) that sounds when your battery is running low, which we heard just a little too often for comfort.

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Conclusion The Samsung Galaxy Y is a budget Android aimed at Y for Youth, and offers a basic spec for a basic price. It will stand up against many budget phones but the recent Huawei Ascend G300, with its four-inch screen and 1GHz processor, shows that the budget Android space is getting ever more advanced.